Day 114 – The Puzzle – Building My Personal Vivid Vision

I picked up this coffee mug in a beach town outside of Charleston, South Carolina.  Like most of my mugs, it’s a memory I’d like to have more often. 

Recently, I completed our company’s Vivid Vision and decided it was time to do one for ME, Matt Plapp.  What do I want in life, but more importantly in the short term?

A few years ago, I landed on my life’s mission: to be able to do what I want, when I want, and with whom I want. 

It sounds lofty, right? But honestly, it’s doable for any of us. Look around; we are all controlled by someone or something. Well, I aim to change that for myself.  One of the few people I’ve heard openly talk about living like this is Dana White, the founder of the UFC as we know it today.  I can’t entirely agree with everything he does in his crazy life, but I agree with how he lives by his own rules.  

So, with that, I started making a list of what I’d like the next three years to look like.  

– I want to take 12 trips every year.  Six will be 2-3 day trips, and the other six will be 4-7 day ones.  

– Read a book every other week

– Pay off all my debt

– Earn $1 million monthly and have $5 million in a savings account that can’t be touched.  

– 10% body fat at 170 pounds

– Dunk a basketball

– Personally build a 6-foot rock wall around our 7-acre property

– Travel to Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Bali and the United Kingdom

– Build our dream home 

– Speak once per quarter in different countries.

– Remodel my parent’s house.

Wild list, right?  And hard to imagine, I agree!  But that’s what a BHAG is all about.

Stay tuned, one day soon I’ll talk about each of these items in detail.

Day 113 – The Puzzle – Music And Why It Helps Me Daily

Most days, a song either lifts me up or throws gas on the fire.  

Recently, I was thinking about WHY?

What is it about music that speaks to me?  Then it hit me: The majority of these singers are on the same path as most entrepreneurs.  They don’t just wake up one day and have millions in the bank and packed arenas.  

They fight the same fight we fight:

– self-doubt

– haters

– long bouts of dry spells

– setbacks

– minor victories

Waking up every day and running hard is tough.  No matter who you are, you’re going to have great days and bad ones.  

So, my words of wisdom today: build playlists.  The song above is from my “Just Vibing” playlist. It has some great songs that put me in another place and make me realize how lucky I am.  I have a playlist for every occasion, but one thing is constant: songs that remind me of who I am and who I can become.  

Recently I stumbled upon this “greatest hits” playlist and a few songs on there really got me thinking.  Especially Rocket Man.  It is lonely out there, and many of us have a long long time until we reach out goals.

Day 112 – The Puzzle – Our 10 Rocks

In yesterday’s blog, I talked about how we just completed our quarterly EOS meeting and chose our 10 rocks. 

But what’s a rock?

My definition is this: A rock is a task you must complete that quarter to make the necessary progress to your annual goals.

The picture below paints a solid picture of how EOS defines it. 

 

I’ll soon publish our Vivid Vision for our company. It’s being rolled out to our team next week and the public after that. But I can give you one insight into our Vivid Vision: We are aiming for a revenue goal of $30 million by May 17th, 2027. 

With that in mind, I’ve worked backward to calculate our monthly revenue goals from now until May 2027.  As I published last week, we just crossed the annual threshold of $8 million.  So, with that in mind, I have to think about our capacity with our current team and the improvements we have to make to our products and new offerings in the future.  As we sit with our team and product offerings, we cannot hit $30 million.  

It’s kind of like a restaurant owner I spoke with recently.  He’s doing $800,000 in annual sales right now but said he can hit $1.4 million with his current restaurant and team.  To get to that $1.4 million goal he took his seating capacity, average check and table turns during his hours of operation and simply did the math.  Then I asked, “What would ALTER your life, and how could you hit that number?”

His answer was $2 million in annual sales. So we started working through what that would look like, but that’s for another blog post; back to my journey 🙂

When I look at what we must do to hit $30 million, it’s a monster! But as they say, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. 

And that’s where the rocks come in. There’s no need for me or my team to worry about the goal we want to hit in 34 months; let’s worry about the goal we need to hit in one year. Let’s think about what our company and products should look like by May 2025 and create quarterly goals to make getting there possible.  

The timeline looks like this:

3rd Quarter – July 27th to October 21st (that’s our next quarterly meeting)

4th Quarter – October 22nd to January 21st (annual 2 day planning)

1st Quarter – January 22nd to April 22nd ( 2 years away, where are we now)

SO WHAT ARE OUR ROCKS & WHY

I don’t expect all of these to 100% make sense to all of my readers, but I’ll do my best to detail each as much as I can, but my team will all know what’s going on.

First, I need to explain that we are really three companies.

1st – Restaurant Marketing That Works is our “corporate”, aka our holding company.  This is where marketing, sales, tech and finance live.  We call it RMTW for short.

2nd – DRYVR – Our restaurant marketing software company.

3rd – America’s Best Restaurants – Our restaurant media company.

RMTW ROCKS

1st – Bruce Plan – Bruce is our new CFO who starts Monday, August 5th.  His official into will come next week.  This is a hire that we should have made a few years ago.  The “Bruce Plan,” as I’ve dubbed it, is basically a plan to get our company out of “Matt Plapp” financial reporting and into what it really should be for a company our size.  

2nd – Marketing Plan – Believe it or not, we practice what we preach but need more.  As our company has grown, our plan hasn’t kept up.  So over the next three months, we’ll rebuild the marketing plan.  We’re going to do it a little differently, though.  With how we are growing, our plan will need to have levels.  What it will look like in 12 months differs significantly from what we must focus on today.  So, we are creating a plan that will add layers as we hit levels; this way, we don’t have to worry about doing stuff now that isn’t needed. It’s really easy to say, “We’re going to do all of this,” but then you look around in 6 months and wonder why you wasted your time on something that wasn’t needed yet.  It’s like many of our restaurant clients who put in their plans TikTok and Instagram while ignoring the fact they suck at email and Facebook.  Tackle what needs to happen now.  Build one bridge at a time. 

What’s the old saying, “putting the cart before the horse.”

3rd -Accountability Charts Completed—This is a function of EOS. It takes your org chart and associates job descriptions, KPIs, etc.  

4th – Find A Replacement For Workplace – I love the saying, “All bad brings good.”  For 5 years, we’ve used Facebook Workplace as a communication platform for clients and our team.  But over the past six months, we’ve realized that we outgrew it, and it was time for something new. The issue was no one wanted to say it, and the thought of moving this was a monstrous task.  But Facebook made our minds up for us when they announced they’d discontinue the platform in August 2025.  They forced our hand and we figured why wait until next year.  Let’s do it now.  So, we’ll research and find a replacement over the next three months.  Then, ideally, we’d have a rock in Q4 to move everything to its new home. 

DRYVER

1st – Launch DYRVER 1.1 – Over the past three months, we’ve transitioned Repeat Returns to DRYVER.  When we acquired Repeat Returns in 2023, we aimed to use the software alongside our marketing services.  However, after six months of analysis, we determined the two companies needed to be merged, and with that, DYRVER was born.  At our April EOS Quarterly, we came up with what the 1st version of DRYVER required to look like to launch the new name by July 26th. Well, we got most of the way there, and now it’s onto the next version.  I’ll write a blog next week on what we plan to add during the 1.1 launch, stay tuned. 

2nd – Hubspot Client Organization Complete – We use the software Hubspot as our CRM.  It’s where we store all client contact information and communication; that’s the goal.  Our sales and marketing team started using Hubspot in 2023. It’s an excellent software to use to understand your customer journey; it’s basically to our company what DYRVER is to our restaurant clients.  Getting this done will allow us to serve our clients at a much higher level and, more importantly, let the entire team see what’s happening, not just one person.  

3rd – 70 new clients of DRYVER or DRYVER Upgrades– If we’re going to do all the stuff above, we’ve got to pay the bills right 🙂 Over the next three months, Shaheen from my team will be in charge of helping clients unlock our new marketing package, Acceleration, and adding brand new restaurant clients. It’s pretty simple: find 70 restaurant owners that need to drive more sales!

America’s Best Restaurants

1st – ABR Roadshow Customer Conversation Journey Complete – The ABR Roadshow started three years ago without thinking about how we would service the monster we were creating.  We overlooked, in a big way, the amount of conversations that we would need to have through the process with restaurant owners, and with that, we failed to deliver an amazing customer experience.  Over the past year, we have tripled the staff that’s a part of this part of our company, and with that, we are retooling to build a process that massively OVER delivers!

2nd – All Sales & Marketing Reports In Hubspot – If you know me, you know I love me some GOOGLE SHEETS 🙂 While those sheets have served us well to this point, it’s time to retire them.  We spend around $6,000 monthly on Hubspot, and we don’t come close to using it to its fullest capabilities.  It’s always funny when you realize that you don’t do everything you do for your clients (like our marketing dashboards and reports) for yourself.  This step will allow us to understand how to optimize our sales and marketing efforts through data.

3rd – Launch ABR Roadshow 4.0 – This has me STOKED!  For three years, I’ve seen restaurants’ massive success with our ABR Roadshow and the marketing that comes with it, but there’s never been a 100% trackable aspect.  But that’s about to change!  With DRYVER now having the Facebook Messenger integration, we could create ABR Rewards, a lighter version of DRYVER 100% developed for Amierica’s Best Restaurants and the ABR Roadshow.  This program will allow us to build a database from the show’s marketing and drive trackable sales to our restaurant partners.  I believve we can get the ROI to a 5-to-1 on the front end.  The second part of 4.0 is something I overlooked that our restaurant partners brought to us. ABR is done about a month after the episodes air, and that’s a problem.  Many owners have asked us, “Can you continue to run marketing for my episode every month for the foreseeable future?” and we didn’t have that program in place.  Well, that’s about to change.  We’ll be able to take the episodes and the marketing elements and extend it for as many months as they’d like.  Basically, creating “reruns” for them, hitting everyone in the region who should be eating there every week.  The scary part is going to be combining this with ABR Rewards.  New viewers and new visitors ON AUTO PILOT!

Well, friends, that’s our ROCKS!  Later this week, I’ll introduce each team member who was tasked with managing each rock; stay tuned.

MP OUT!

 

Day 111 – The Puzzle – 10 Rocks!

Many hands make light work.

We’ve all heard the saying, but have we all experienced it?

From 2008 until 2017, I ran my company as a one-man show. In 2011, I hired Ashley, my first employee. She was my right hand and made life so much easier. However, I don’t think until 2017 that I realized she and other leaders would be the key to our future growth. Like most founders, I thought I had to do everything and that I was the only one who could do it as well as me or how I wanted it done.  

Then, my vision became clear, and I knew I needed another leader to help me reach the next level. With that epiphany, I handed Ashley the keys to her department and our second employee. That was seven years ago, and I think 55 employees ago. 

Well, this past Friday, my leadership team sat down for our quarterly EOS meeting. EOS is a company that has built a proven strategy for structuring decision-making and aligning that decision-making with goals.  I found EOS many years ago through a few books by the founder, Gino Wickman.  I “attempted” to put in place some of the systems from EOS as far back as 2018 but with my own twist.  Then, in 2023, our COO, Doug Smith, became a big fan of EOS and started implementing their teachings.  

We had our first annual two-day. EOS deep dive in January of this.  In those two days, we identified some goals and issues to tackle in 2024, but we also figured out that someone else had to lead the EOS meetings if we wanted to see the true power of EOS.  So, we hired Lyn Askin (Black shirt i the picture above) to be our EOS Implementer.  

Lyn led our April Quarterly and July meetings on Friday. Both meetings brought massive growth from my team and our vision. April was much more challenging, and we left with too much on our plate, but Lyn warned us of this. Last week, we went with a very manageable workload of quarterly goals (called ROCKS in EOS), but more importantly, we left with a massive sense of teamwork.  

In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll cover our ROCKS and what they mean to our vision, but today, I want to cover what hit me hard.  

As I said above, it took me many years to appoint another leader to run side-by-side with me.  Looking around the room Friday, I saw seven leaders in it to win it.  

Seven “ride-or-dies,” and I can’t tell you how great it felt.  Some days, I scare myself with what we are building, but then I look around like I did Friday and realize that I’m not alone.  At these times, I realized how “many hands make light work.”

Talk tomorrow,

MP

P.S. We have a HUGE announcement next week on our 8th horseman joining the RMTW leadership team!!!


Day 110 – The Puzzle – IF

This section and this one word got my attention while reading this week.

On page 11 of Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, he says, “The Goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding IF and when you’re going to go deep.”

The word IF hit home.  A few years ago, I decided to take the “if” out of what I wear daily, and I switched to orange shirts with our company branding.  A year after that, I took the IF out of what color shoes I would wear and went with only orange shoes.  

It eliminated the daily micro decision and took a step to help market our company better.  However, the instance in which Cal uses “IF” here is similar but different.  

Last week, I was in the gym’s bathroom when another member walked in. We exchanged small talk. He basically said he almost didn’t come because he was exhausted and not in the mood, but his wife convinced him to get his but there. I asked a straightforward question: “Was going to the gym on your calendar?”

And before he could answer, I said, “It’s on mine, and shooting basketball after this is as well, and both will happen.  If something is on my calendar, and I put it there, I must live up to my commitments.”

Cal’s idea of planning your DEEP WORK is the same. It will be simpler to complete if you schedule this block of time to handle this task every day, week, or month.  

So, my question to you today is also simple.  Take some time and think about what you should do every day, every week, and every month to accomplish your goals.  Then, create a meeting invite for YOURSELF and never miss it.  Create a command that takes away the IF!

As I type this and think about my IFs’ they are as follows

– Move every day. (walk, stretch, run, lift, basketball)

– Read every day (but I need to examine this because I can’t tell you the last 7-day reading streak I’ve had).

– Write every day (I’m getting better)

– Deep Work 3 times weekly

– Quiet Reflection time consistently (a new one that came out of a meeting this past week).  

That’s all I’ve got for you today, off to work on my IFs’!


Day 109 – The Puzzle – A Skill We All Must Master

To summarize the quote above, “We find ourselves rushing to reply to emails vs doing our best work.”

In December 2020, I was introduced to Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. It was a much-needed hack at the time because I found myself a slave to my inbox and notifications tab on numerous apps. My life had become full of distractions, and my attention had broken into many pieces. 

Sitting down to focus on one task was challenging. Sitting down for a few hours to think without distractions was impossible.  This book gave me a new perspective on why this was an issue, and I changed my habits.  But as I sat on a cruise two weeks ago trying to write a simple blog post, I was pulled in every direction.  I had this urge to click over to my email tab, open the texting browser, and finish on Facebook, all while trying to write a short blog post.  

Four years earlier, this book taught me why these apps on my phone made me dumber and not the leader I needed to be. Cals’ writing exposed my flaws and taught me a new skill: Deep Work. I had a new appreciation for taking 3-4 hours with just me, a pen, and a notepad. And the results were insane. Our company saw massive growth in many areas due to my newfound focus. But like many habits we create, we slip back into our old ways.  

In episode 679, I talk about my journey with this book and how you should start one as well. CLICK HERE to listen to episode 679 of Restaurant Marketing Secrets. 

Day 108 – The Puzzle – Two Restaurants Are Running Facebook Ads & Here’s What I Found Out

Not all Restaurant Facebook ads are created equal. 

As you know, I always talk about the power of Facebook ads and how restaurants are CRAZY for not using them to drive sales. This week, I had Zoom meetings with two restaurant owners running Facebook ads, and I was excited. But once we got talking, that excitement turned to concern. I’m sure you can relate to the feeling when you see a fully utilized potential.  

On one hand, it’s great that they see the value and have pulled the trigger.  But on the other hand, they have hired companies that aren’t doing it right. Choosing the right companies to run your Facebook ads is crucial, as it’s only a matter of time before these owners think Facebook ads don’t work versus this company’s broken strategy.  

Both companies run generic video ads directing traffic to the restaurant’s website or online ordering platform.  However, a critical flaw in each instance is the absence of tracking systems to monitor the success of the campaigns.  They cannot identify the visitors to the website or whether they are making a purchase.  They aren’t even attempting to gain customer information.  This is like running a radio ad and hoping someone hears it and takes action.  The MASSIVE value of Facebook ads is the ability to take customers on a journey.  

That journey for me is ABR, a strategy I’ll delve into below. I believe it could be a game-changer for these businesses. 

In addition, the agency’s sales pitch is that the ads are “getting engagements.”  For these owners, that seemed like a minor win, but it’s not. Facebook video views count as engagements, the same way a comment does. Video views are incredible when that’s what you’re trying to get. However, in these instances, the owners hope customers can land on their website and place an order.  

The picture at the top of this page exemplifies how you can be tricked into thinking an ad is working.  The orange box shows you 602 post engagements, which can sound incredible.  WOW, 602 engagements with my ad.  But when you find that 587 were 3-second plays, you realize it’s not all it’s made out to be. While there’s value in a 3-second video view like there is any advertising impression, it’s not the engagement that matters for this ad.  This ad was built for CLICKS, and only 13 of the 602 engagements are CLICKS!

 

As you’ll see in the picture below, the other ads tell a different story.  

 

On the 2nd line, the ad labeled “Opt-In (Message) is an ad meant to get people to click a button that messages the page; the ONLY goal of that ad is to gain new messaging connections.  These message connections get the customers to opt into your marketing program, which takes them on a journey to spend money in your restaurant.  

In this ad, there were 256 engagements, 185 of which were link clicks, the goal of the ad.  Of those 185 link clicks, 55 gave the restaurant their information. Now, this is where the NEXT LEVEL comes into play.  Because we are putting these customers into our DRYVER software, I can see that 14 went into the restaurant immediately and spent $962.   

As you can see, not all “Facebook engagements” are created equal.  

Now, let’s delve into our unique ABR STRATEGY. This strategy, which stands for Attract, Build, Retain, is designed to not just engage customers, but to guide them through a journey that culminates in spending at your restaurant.

A = Attract

B = Build

R = Retain

In my 2nd example, it went like this

A = We spent $242 to ATTRACT the attention of potential customers.

B = We BUILT a database of 55 customers from the 256 post engagements

R = We RETAINED their attention after the ad with emails and texts from our marketing campaign that drove approximately $962 in sales.

And now the fun starts since you have 55 new customers in your database, of which 14 have already spent money.  Those customers will be worth $10,000+ in future sales with no cost associated with them again.

 

In episode 676 of Restaurant Marketing Secrets we talk about this topic, CLICK HERE to listen to this 5-minute impactful podcast. 

Day 107 – The Puzzle – You Can Do It To, Our Journey From Start-Up To $8 Million

From $0 to $8 Million

This past week at the 7FA Mastermind event I was awarded the $8 Million Agency award. I wasn’t really prepared to speak about what it meant, or how I got there.

After the session, I had great conversations with people who appreciated my words. As we talked I was recounting the years it took to build this company and after I spoke with each person I was like “Oh, I wish I’d told them this.”

So on the flight home, I decided to chronicle my entire journey. I wanted to do this because I recall how lonely this journey was from 2008-2016. And even since 2016, it’s been lonely. Let’s face it, it’s tough to talk to others about your trials and tribualations.

SIDEBAR FOR MY RESTAURANT OWNERS

What you’re about to read is my journey as a marketing company, so while it might not seem relevant, it is. The struggles, lessons, and hustle are all the same. To put things in perspective most marketing companies have annual revenue of $200-300,000 and are striving to hit seven figures, like I was in 2016. It’s like a restaurant doing $500,000 aiming for $1.5 million.

Originally I was only writing this for a private Facebook group of the members of 7FA. The reason I decided to edit it and publish it on my blog was simple. I wanted to challenge a good friend of mine, Avery Ward, to write the same post but for his restaurant. WHY? Because he took over a family pizza joint doing $500K 7 years ago and has grown it to over $5 million!

Now that you have some backstory, he’s the goal for our company. As you can tell from the title of this blog, we are an $8 million marketing company at this point, and as you’ll see below that number has been going up every year since 2016 when we decided to make the shift from Me & Ashley, to what you see today.

We are on pace to hit $30 million by mid-2027. My BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) is $100 million by 2030. To put that crazy $100M # in perspective, that means that our marketing firm will be like a national restaurant franchise with a few hundred locations.

NOW BACK TO THE STORY

As I started to write I visualized that moment when I had the microphone in front of all of you on Wednesday, I thought “What would Matt Plapp from 2017 want to hear during that speech?”

I also thought about what I’d think about what someone in that position would say, and how it would relate to me.

Would I believe I could do that?

Would I think it was achievable for me?

Would I have the self-belief that “I was that guy?”

I thought back to my first marketing agency intensive with Billy Gene in the Fall of 2016. How at that moment we did $20-30K each month and what I would take from someone doing 20x that.

Could I relate?

Over the past five days I’ve thought a lot about what I should have said, could have said and now WANT to say.

Most importantly I want all of you to know that you 100% can hit $8 million. It’s simply a number. Think about it this way.
You’ve all done $80,000 in 1 year right? Well, $800,000 is you simply doing that ten times.
And $8 million is you doing what you did to hit $800,000 ten times.

Math, right 🙂

The first time I heard this example it made me say “he’s right, I can do 10x this” and then I scared the shit out of myself because I now saw on paper that $100 million could be done. $100 Million Matt, have you mixed too much coffee and Red Bull Matt?

So I’m going to take you on a journey, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll really enjoy the rest.

This $8 million award isn’t the product of the past 12 months, 36 months, heck it’s not a product of the past 60 months.

It’s the product of the past 25 years.

On March 13th, 1999, I started selling radio advertising at WGRR. This career would last 4 years, and I’d make a lot of money. But more importantly, I’d be shaping the mindset that I’d use 9 years later to launch my agency in 2008.

And if having a full-time job wasn’t enough, in July 1999 I bought a book on web design and built a website for an idea my dad had, an online boat and RV dealership. I knew absolutely nothing about the internet except it seemed like it had a bright future. To put that in layman’s terms, I was not a techie. In fact I made fun of my wife for using this thing called EMAIL 🙂

From July 1999 until March 2003 I would do both of these jobs at 100% of my ability 7 days per week.

In radio, I became one of the top sales reps for our four radio stations and one of the top in all of Cincinnati. But that wasn’t because I knew how to sell, it was because of my Dad. My father is the Michael Jordan of sales and he took me under his wing when I got the radio job, putting me through his own “sales school.” The biggest thing I learned from him was to be a “consultive seller.” He always told me “Don’t sell something they don’t need, listen and only sell what helps solve their problems.” As I matured as a radio sales rep I took this to heart, commonly walking away from deals because I knew they didn’t need what I had. I choose long-term relationships and trust over a paycheck.

In March 2003 I resigned from my job at the radio station to focus on our dealership. What had started as a website was now a 2 location dealership doing $5 million. Over the next 5 years, we would grow to $15 million and one of the top fishing boat dealerships in the country. We dominated the internet and were the top search result on this website called GOOGLE for all things fishing boat-related. I accidentally learned this thing I’d later learn was called “SEO.”

Flash forward to 2006 and my former radio clients were asking me for advice on how to build websites and market their companies on the internet. I had accidentally become a legend in the boat business nationwide with our online presence. And with “fame” came many articles published in industry magazines and local papers about how this small boat dealership was using the internet to sell boats. If you come to our HQ in Florence KY you’ll see many of these articles hanging in our hallways. I’m not sure what caused me to hang onto them many years ago, but I’m glad I did.

As I started to help former radio clients with their websites and SEO I realized how much I loved helping others. And in late 2007 my brother, father, and I all realized we hated the boat business. We’d grown the business on the backs of the banks and the stress was unbearable. Plus, none of us enjoyed managing 40 employees. So in January 2008, we put in place a plan to exit the business by year’s end.

I started working on my agency and I also ended up taking a gig back in radio with the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals radio network. As we wound down the dealership, I was also back to two full-time jobs and running the dealership on nights and weekends. But, I figured I could weather the storm of 3 jobs for a year or two.

Well, one of those jobs went away faster than expected. As you all know the economy collapsed in the Summer of 2008 and so did our dealership.

Our boat dealership went from doing $1.4 million in July 2007 to $48,000 in July 2008. We lost MILLIONS that summer trying to save it, but in the end, we closed up shop sooner than we thought and without the 7-figure exit we had planned 🙁

But with all bad comes good.

At the end of the day, it was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to step up my game on both fronts, the agency and radio gig. I had no choice but to get uncomfortable and put my foot on the gas.

I’m telling you all this to frame the lessons I learned from 1999 to 2008 that made my success as an agency owner a little easier. So now onto the good stuff.

1st – I had no choice. Losing wasn’t an option. This forced me to get really uncomfortable and run harder than ever. You know the old saying “burn the ships”, well I didn’t have to burn my ships, the economy handled that for me. (As I’m proofing this it hit me the irony of that, being we were a boat dealership)

2nd – During my time in radio I learned what would end up being my calling card, ROI. The question I hated asking my radio clients was “How are the spots working?” Clients had no clue, and neither did I. As I learned about internet marketing through our boat dealerships online success from 2003-2008 I came to love it. I could see when a customer got an email, responded with a question, walked into the dealership a week later, and BOUGHT a boat. I could finally answer the age-old question “How are the ads working.”

3rd – I learned what it was like to buy advertising and marketing and not see results. I learned the pain of money leaving the bank account and nothing coming back from those efforts. I think that’s something many marketing people don’t have experience with. In my opinion, It’s much easier to appreciate the need for results when you have felt the pain of writing the check.

4th – I learned to see the pain in a business owner’s eyes. I learned this through my own experience. I recall nights I had to sleep on the sofa with the TV on just so I could fall asleep. Those were the nights before payroll was hitting and I didn’t know if the money would be in the account the next day. On my second stint in radio, I recall a conversation with a guy who owned a transmission company and was a client. I could see it in his eyes, he was in a bad place, and so I asked him “How can I help, you’re not doing well are you?” I was right and I helped him buy marketing from someone else, who I thought had a product better suited for his needs.

5th – I learned the importance of a well-rounded marketing plan executed over a long period. You see, all advertising works. Once you have the right target, it’s simply a matter of putting together a plan to stay in front of them for a LONG TIME! In our boat dealership, I had a plan that covered every possible angle and I had no intentions of giving up on it. That’s why from 2002 – 2005 we dominated every fishing boat dealership in the country. They were focused on marketing that works NOW, while I was working on a plan that would work forever …minus the economy crashing 🙂

I’ve also proved #5 with my agency. If you know me, then you know that we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. From my orange branding, content, ads, and emails, we’ve not stopped and we won’t!

OK, so now onto what my journey looked like from 2008 to today.

I’m going to give you a rundown of our growth year by year and some notes on what I learned or changed along the way. I’ll put next to each year what I recall my mindset was at that time and what our average monthly revenue was that year.

2008 = “What Would You Do If You Were Me”

2008 Average MRR -$2,500-5,000

How I started my agency was pure and quite simple. I reached out to the network I had developed over the years and said “Here’s my idea on starting a marketing agency, what do you think? What would you do if you were me and how would you charge people?” The funny thing was, 4 out of the first 5 people I asked that question said “shit, figure it out and you’re hired.” They were friends and my first 4 clients. I used what they told me they needed and built from there.

2009 = “Paid With $4,000 In A Brown Bag”

2009 Average MRR – $5-7,500

This was a crazy year since I was in radio full-time and building the agency. I wasn’t hitting every radio client with my agency pitch, but many found out and a few became clients. Ironically I was also buying media on my station and every other one in Cincinnati, for my agency clients. This made for some interesting conversations with the radio accounting department, as they’d never had a sales rep paying client bills 🙂

As I thought back on this time a funny, and strange memory came up. I recalled the time a client paid me monthly with $4,000 cash in a brown bag. This has a SIZABLE company in Cincinnati that if I mentioned their name, everyone here would know who they are. I still to this day have no idea why I wasn’t paid through traditional methods. My assumption was the marketing director didn’t want his bosses to know I was the one doing the work, out of concern for his job, but that is just speculation. But I took my money, reported it like all other income, and went on my way.

2010 = “This Better Work Matt”

2010 Average MRR $8,500
In the Fall of 2009, I left the radio job and decided to focus 100% on the agency. During that year of doing both, I had an illusion that I could do that for a while. When I left I was making around $160,000 in radio and I had the agency hovering around $100K. My last radio commission check in November 2009 was around $25,000, so heading into 2010 I had a big ass hole to fill and I turned it up a few notches.

2011 = “I Need Help”

2011 Average MRR $16,000
June 2011 was a HUGE month for me. It’s when I put my fears aside and hired my first employee. I had thought I could do this alone, but I found out quickly that I was not a business owner, I was employee #1! I had bought myself a job, a damn busy one at that. So I sucked it up and realized I could not do this alone. I stood up at a BNI meeting in April and asked for a referral to someone who understood the internet, knew how to use a smartphone, understood social media and only needed 5-10 hours per week. Peggy Sparks referred her 22-year-old daughter to me, and it forever changed the trajectory of this company. Thinking back, I can’t help but think how freaking lucky I was to find someone as solid as Ashley on my first hire. Ashley is still by my side and is in charge of DRYVER, our restaurant marketing software company.

2012-2014 = “Run & Gun”

2012 Average MRR $16,862
2103 Average MRR $15,208
2014 Average MRR $17,137

In these 3 years, it was exactly what it says above, RUN & GUN! I was doing seminars every month, BNI every week and networking like my life depended on it. One thing that helped during these 3 years was the fact I only took on specific clients and knew how to tell others no. This is why we only lost one client from 2008 to 2018, our churn was basically zero. One thing that also sticks out to me is how I was ultra-focused on delivering an amazing product/service and not growing revenue. I think a lot of times we try to scale something without actually knowing that we have an amazing product. I see this in the restaurant business all the time. People open one location and a year later are already opening stores two and three, even though the first one hasn’t made money and reviews are average. I wish I could say not growing these three years was on purpose, but it wasn’t. I simply did not have enough time to perform at a high level for any more clients, so this is where we landed. Plus, I wasn’t worried about making a lot of money, I simply wanted to do something that I enjoyed and pay the bills.

2015 “Shit’s About To Get Real!”

2015 Average MRR $19,000
At this time we had 34 clients from 31 industries. I had no clue that a company like ours should “niche down.” I didn’t know you could focus on one industry and go all in like that, but I soon found out. Everything that we did for clients was a one-off campaign and with clients from all types of industries, it meant that we had very little that we could replicate between clients.

Then, in April 2015 I found what I’d been looking for. A repeatable and duplicatable campaign that worked across multiple clients. The one industry we did have multiple clients in, was the restaurant business. We had 9 restaurants at the time, and when I figured out how to create marketing funnels and campaigns that I could use across all six I was in love. By the end of 2015, I realized I had something here, but I didn’t know what the next step was.

2016-2017 “Build What You Need”

2016 Average MRR $21,000
2017 Average MRR $26,000

The irony of how success found me this year is, well ironic. I was in the midst of building a product that I needed for my restaurant clients. Ashley and I had become really good at gaining Facebook engagements and getting people to take us up on our offers, but something was missing. I needed a tool that would connect to our marketing campaigns that allowed me to gain customer data and deliver to them a trackable offer. The problem was, I had NO CLUE how to do it. In fact, the prior year I’d gone to the National Restaurant Show with hopes of finding this product, and all that I found there were marketing tactics from the 1980s.

Since that time I’ve read many books about major companies we all buy from every day and how their products were a product of a problem someone had. As I look back on this, I smile because all I wanted was to find a way to show my clients how the marketing was working and to drive sales. I didn’t have some evil plan to build a product to sell and take over the world, I just wanted to help and prove what I knew was working once and for all.

This is where IRONY, or maybe the universe strikes. It was June 2016 and I saw a Facebook ad from this crazy guy named “Billy Gene” of Billy Gene Is Marketing. The ad spoke to me. It promised me a flash drive of exactly what I needed in exchange for, wait for it… my contact info:) I could get a free download for my name, email, and phone number. Or I could upgrade for $25 and have a flash drive mailed to me with everything on it. And there was a free webinar that weekend just for agency owners. Long story short, I bought the flash drive, paid for an appointment, and bought EVERY DAMN THING Billy had to sell for the next three years.

As I type this out I am smiling ear to ear. At the time I had no idea what he was doing to me, exactly what I wanted to do for my restaurant clients.

Billy’s programs also introduced me to some great entry-level tech that I could use to build my own system. In 2017 I launched what I called the “ROI Engine” and it worked AMAZING! So with that, I launched my agency nationwide and gained 19 clients. All of which we lost in under six months. Yep, I’d gone from an agency that NEVER lost a client to one that lost them all, over and over again.

So as I sat in the 7FA event last week and heard people talk about their disappointing results. Agency owners one to three years into their journey with 10-20% churn rate and I laughed knowing that I had 100% churn early on as we scaled.

What I’d like to pass onto other agency owners is this. Many of you are trying to do in a few years what took me MANY YEARS. So give yourself a break and realize hard shit is, well HARD. And it takes time.

2018 – 2020 “Stay Focused, We Know What Works”

2018 Average MRR $44,000
2019 Average MRR $73,000
2020 Average MRR $76,000

These 3 years were tough. First, it was avoiding the “shiny object” syndrome, and second “Covid.” 2017 was my introduction to business masterminding. I now had hundreds of friends around the world in the exact business as me. This was great on one hand, and terrible on the other. Masterminding is the ultimate cheat code, it’s what has helped me build what we have today. I can learn from friends who are on the same path as me, some behind and some ahead of me. It’s a great way to find out what potholes to avoid and how to optimize what we are doing.

But there’s also the temptation to fall for a new shiny THING! You see a friend cruising it on this thing called “Bitcoin” and you have to remind yourself that you can’t do everything. I was pretty fortunate that I didn’t fall for many of those items, but I did have one big hiccup. In 2018 after I wrote my first book, Don’t 86 Your Restaurant Sales, I launched a restaurant training to help us gain more clients. It attracted 100 customers in the first push, but 99 of those were marketing companies like mine. I didn’t know how to say no and thought “I can do this and run our restaurant agency. So with that from mid-2018 to the end of 2019, I ran an agency training program and my agency. And while this gave me a short-term victory with some cash, it hurt my long-term growth. My coach Billy Gene and a friend Mike Arce had both told me to pick a lane, but I knew better than them (at least I thought I did). By doing what I did I had split my attention and hurt our core business. So in late 2019 I closed down the program and told myself ONE LANE MATT! But as you’ll see in my next chapter, I don’t always listen to myself.

2021-2023 “Oops I Did It Again” (cue Brittney)

2021 Average MRR $120,000
2022 Average MRR $222,000
2023 Average MRR $406,000

I did it again, by accident. In 2020 my team and I discovered something massive. Everything we’d been doing for years was working, but for some clients, it was working much better than it was for others.

BUT WHY?

Well, it turns out your story and use of social media when you’re a mom-and-pop restaurant is much more important than anyone ever thought. During the pandemic, the big brands, the chains, used their war chest of money to advertise like crazy and drive their sales. Meanwhile, the independent restaurants were stuck getting their asses kicked. But not all of them were losing. The ones we saw winning had figured out that social media wasn’t just a replacement for “Money Mailer style marketing,” but a place to connect with their community. They were using Facebook Lives to tell stories and gain engagement.

That was all I needed to push me over the edge with an idea I’d created a few years earlier, America’s Best Restaurants, a media company for small local restaurants. What started as a marketing idea for our restaurant marketing agency quickly grew to its separate company with 29 employees and an overhead of $4 million…HOLY SHIT!

My goal with America’s Best Restaurants when I thought of the idea way back in 2018 was two prong.

First, I wanted to create a social media first media company focused on broadcasting the stories of independent restaurants. Second, I wanted to create a marketing brand that restaurant owners trusted and that would help elevate the badass marketing that we could do on their behalf.
What I didn’t plan on, was having 4 Mercedes Vans and 30 or so employees filming, editing, and marketing these episodes.

During this time my biggest regret is losing sight of our finances. I put so much money into our product and sales, that I forgot we should probably have an accounting team. Funny fact, up until November of 2024 Matt Plapp did every single thing in our company as it related to money, HR, and payroll. On top of my duties as our CEO and head of sales, I was also our bookkeeper and CFO 🙂 I logged every client payment, collected past-due balances, and ran payroll. Part of that was due to fear of someone stealing from me, but most of it was being thick-headed and thinking ONLY MATT CAN DO THIS! Looking back, had we hired a CFO 2 years prior we’d easily have seven figures in the bank and probably be twice the size we are now, but it is what it is. You live and you learn. Our new CFO Bruce, starts in two weeks!!!

One last thing from these years. With ABR Growing how it did from a marketing initiative to its own company, it did exactly what my agency training program did in 2018, it split my attention. Up to early 2023, I was pretty bummed that I could not get both sides to grow how I wanted, but I eventually realized what we were doing was the ultimate long-term play, and it would help us grow when the time was right and at a level never seen before.

2024 – “The Hardest Part About Writing Your Story Is Knowing Your Worth The Ink”

Average MRR $600,000 (aiming to end 2024 around $850,000 MRR)

Now that you’re up to date, let’s talk about the final piece to the puzzle that we put in place at the end of 2023. I’ve not talked about this yet, but in 2021 our team made our first Vivid Vision. An eight-page document that laid out what we wanted to become by December 31st, 2023. One of the visions was to create a restaurant-exclusive software, Database Dynamite. A software that took everything we did with new customer acquisition through social media and combined it with restaurant loyalty, rewards, and customer communication (email, text, messenger, direct mail).

The reason I felt this software was needed was so we could complete the marketing puzzle and show our restaurant clients the lifetime value of the database we were helping them build. Up to that point, we’d only been able to show them the front-end results of our marketing programs and “hoped” they understood the value of the database and its long-term implications.

But, as we all figure out over time, we as marketers appreciate customer data and the attention you can gain from it WAYYYYYY more than the clients. Clients simply want to drive sales. They want to see results today for what they paid for yesterday. And while I don’t always agree with that, I realize that we have to be able to deliver what they need now, while helping to build the future. This is why we acquired Repeat Returns on November 3rd, 2023, and have spent the past 7 months combining it with our marketing services agency to create our new company, DRYVER!

DRYVER – Helping Restaurants DRIVE sales.

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So, kids, that’s my story. We’ve got a long way to go before I declare success, but I am damn proud of what we’ve done up to this point.

Stay tuned…